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Twitter and Facebook may view each other as competitors, but they serve different purposes and have different money-making opportunities.

There's an unproven but lofty idea that the future of monetization on the web -- the next big thing since Google -- is real-time search. But while processing information quickly is key, the way Twitter and Facebook are used makes them suited for two different flavors of this stuff: conversational marketing and socially informed information, respectively. What Facebook and Twitter have in common an opportunity to figure out what's important because people are talking about it. But because of the different purposes they serve, both will leverage their data in different ways.